Akin’s Choice, and Ours

“Do you feel betrayed by your fellow Republicans?” Mike Huckabee asked Congressman Todd Akin, who had called in to his radio show to say, for the record, that he was not dropping out of Missouri’s Senate race. Many of those fellow Republicans had spent the day hoping, hinting, or demanding that Akin do just that. On Sunday, Akin had talked in an interview about how the “female body” had ways to avoid pregnancy in cases of “legitimate rape”—to “shut that whole thing down”—dismissing the idea that there would be any “tough sort of ethical question” if rape victims had, as he hoped, no access to abortion. As it happened, those remarks came two days before a deadline, at 5 P.M. on Tuesday, after which, under Missouri law, it would be a little harder to replace him—and so there was a rush to push him aside. Mitt Romney came out, with a few hours to go, to say that Akin’s “fellow Missourians urged him to step aside, and I think he should accept their counsel and exit the Senate race.”

But Akin, like Romney, is his party’s nominee—not that Romney’s status seems to have impressed Akin much. One of the first things he told Huckabee, after saying that he took rape “very, very seriously,” was that the uproar had reminded him of how important his own voice was to the G.O.P.: “I believe there is a cause here,” he said, one involving “a creator God” as “the very source of American freedom.” As for betrayal,

Well it does seem just—misspoke one word in one sentence on one day. I hadn’t done anything that was morally or ethically wrong, as sometimes people in politics do. We do a lot of talking, and to get a word in the wrong place—you know, that’s not a good thing to do, or to hurt anybody that way.

But it does seem like a little bit of an overreaction.

The “one word” Akin meant was “legitimate”; but, as Hendrik Hertzberg notes, Akin has made it clear that he doesn’t think the problem was that he put any modifier before the word rape—just that he said “legitimate” rather than “forcible.” Does that make anyone feel better? One might think it would make the Republican congressmen who voted with him to add the word “forcible” before “rape” in statutes about the sort of abortions federal health funds might help pay for feel worse. (Paul Ryan, Romney’s running mate, co-sponsored that bill.) But that sort of regret or reflection might be too much to hope for, given the current consensus on abortion within the G.O.P.

There are a few other ways to measure the actual level of Republican contrition about what Akin had to say. One is that Huckabee, early in the interview, read quotes from John Willke, a leading figure in the “pro-life” movement, about how “false claims” of rape were used to justify abortion. Another is that, on Tuesday, the drafters of the G.O.P.’s platform approved language—which the party has used before—saying that “the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed”—no exception for a woman who is raped, no exception for a child who is a victim of incest, and calling for a Constitutional amendment saying so. This has been Ryan’s position, too. Romney has supported such exceptions, but he and that platform will be acclaimed together at the G.O.P.’s convention in Tampa next week.

There are, no doubt, shades of conviction within the G.O.P.—even some lonely pro-choice types, though they have mostly been chased away. The parameters have become more and more narrow. As Irin Carmon noted at Salon, if supporting access to abortion under desperate circumstances like rape counts as moderation, we have reached an extreme point.

Akin is not, in other words, all that much of an outlier in the Republican Party, even if he talks more openly about God’s role in politics than some national politicians do. (And this is why any Republican who wants some distance from Akin should be pressed to answer some simple questions first.) This ideological congeniality is the source of Akin’s puzzlement, of his idea that there has been “an overreaction” to his words. For a man confounded by basic biological facts, he is more clear-eyed than many prominent Republicans about how little difference there is between what he says and what the party wants to do in Washington. To recognize this is to wonder whether there hasn’t been an under-reaction to Akin—not just to what he said, but to what he revealed.

The Republican establishment, as it is called—this includes Senator John Cornyn, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, but also Karl Rove, in a room somewhere issuing Super PAC checks—clearly wants Akin to go away. He embarrassed them; they don’t think he can win now, and they think that he might keep others from winning. For those reasons, Democrats, either quietly or, in the case of Akin’s opponent, Claire McCaskill, loudly, seem eager to keep Akin in the race. Perhaps they should beware of what they wish for. One can be too entranced with game theory; it tends to be not only easier but helpful for the integrity of the process to hope that both parties put up the best candidates that they can. McCaskill has been doing badly in the polls. Akin could still win. Is his usefulness as a target worth his presence in the Senate? If the Democrats are only looking for a way to make the point that there is rampant scientific illiteracy in the G.O.P.—that it managed to nominate a clown, a candidate who doesn’t know how the “female body” works—then it is, indeed, in their interest to maneuver to keep Akin in the race. If their interest is to wage a serious fight for women’s health, women’s lives, and, yes, women’s basic liberty, they don’t need Akin, any more than the Republicans have needed him to take the other side.

Akin does think that the Republicans need him: he told Huckabee that by staying in the race he could help “strengthen” the party, in part by talking more about God’s role. Akin also seems ready to make do without the money the party has now withdrawn from his campaign: he said that he had, since Sunday, gotten “tremendous support” from others quarters, and close to midnight, he tweeted:

Donations are pouring in. Thank you for standing up against the liberal elite https://www.akin.org/contribute/

If one remembers what Akin said, after all, one might well ask how the choice of one, or two, or three words could change much. He has now acknowledged that it is possible for rape to lead to pregnancy—but then he said in his original interview that there might be rare times when the shutdown switch “didn’t work or something.” The choice of one word doesn’t undo his writing-off of the dilemmas faced by the thousands of rape victims, many of them young girls, who are estimated to become pregnant each year in America. (It has happened to many thousands more after mass incidents like the genocide in Rwanda.)

Similarly, the Republican Party’s policies toward women were not written in a single primary in Missouri, and are not composed of a single name. Editing out that one word—Akin—is not enough to reset the script. The question isn’t whether Republicans “betrayed” Akin, or whether he, in another sense of the word, betrayed a truth about the party. It is who betrayed women in America, who is willing to fight for women—and what women, when they walk into the polls on election day, see as their choice.